First off, legal definitions aside, piracy is not theft. The people who are always shouting out "Piracy is theft!" are the same people who think that if they try really hard, they can give 110%. It's a nice idea, but it's simply not true.

That's not to say that piracy is ethical, but the criteria by which it is potentially non-ethical are largely separate from the criteria by which theft is definitely non-ethical.

I count three arguments to be made against piracy:

1. Direct Loss of Income. This is the simplest of the three arguments to make. If you're downloading something for free that you would otherwise pay money for, then you're denying income to people who should otherwise expect to be compensated for their work.

   But where do we draw the line? Is checking out a book from the library immoral? Taping a song off the radio? Borrowing a friend's hat?

   An argument can be made that file sharing is only illegal because it does what people have always done fairly, but it does it on a macro-scale. The counter-argument, which I think has some validity, is that the micro-exceptions are only acceptable because of their micronicity.

   The fair way to address this argument would be to compensate the creators in some way. Buy the book AND download the PDF. Download the TV show AND buy the DVD.

   Or just send a check to everyone involved with the work, made out for the exact amount they would have made off of the actual physical product. (The math on this gets tricky.)

2. Creator Distribution Rights. Copyright laws were originally drafted to ensure that creators could profit financially from their work. There was no high-minded purpose behind these laws, except that Edward the Funny needed to make money off of his jokes in order to eat, so that he could keep entertaining the King*.

   (*May not have actually happened that way.)

   Today, though, some recognize a moral right beyond that pragmatic necessity: the right of creators to control the distribution of their work. Should creators have the right to determine the methods by which their work is distributed? Should creators have the right to deny distribution all together?

   Could Edward the Funny demand that his best joke never be told?

   There's a competing argument that "art should be free." And by "free" here, I don't necessarily mean "free of charge." But art should always be available. Artists, under this view, don't have the right to "take their work back" once it has been released, because once it's been released it belongs to the world.

   Ultimately, this tension is resolved in copyright law by dictating that all copyrights must eventually expire. Creators profit off their work (or don't), die, and 100 years later the original books are free online and Alan Moore has written League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

   As we've discussed previously, when creators choose to distribue their work for financial gain, that decision needs to be respected. But if they choose to NOT distribute their work, they're playing from a weaker ethical hand.

   Again, the question is simple: "Are creators being fairly compensated for their work?"

   Based on my evaluation of rules 1 and 2, it's looking like file sharing is ethical if and only if: (a) the work is publically available through separate, legal means of distribution, and (b) the consumer purchases an additional "legal copy" through such legal distribution channels.

   But there's a third dimension to this discussion:

3. Secondary Loss of Income. The reality of most modern file sharing technology is that you're not JUST downloading a file, you're also re-distributing it. As you download from Faceless Source X, others are downloading from Faceless Source U.

   Unless you're part of a small, closed network, there's simply no way for you to know how many of the people who are downloading from you are going to fairly compensate the creators for their work.

   Reason suggests that most won't.

   The question, oh most ethical Pirate O' The Seven Internets, is whether you give a rat's ass. Seriously.

   If a restaurant pays the wait staff in tips, that presents an opportunity for waiters not to declare their full income and skimp on their taxes. The restaurant isn't responsible for the waitstaff's unethical behavior. Providing a framework in which someone else can choose to do something immoral is not the same as doing that immoral thing yourself.

   That said, if you have a reasonable expectations that others will exploit your actions to do something immoral, you probably have done something immoral. You don't lay out steak knives for a serial killer.

THE VERDICT:
If you're illegally downloading work from the internet and you're not compensating the creators at comperable market value, it's immoral. If you're illegally downloading work from the internet and you are compensating the creators, it's only slightly immoral.

But if you're illegally downloading work from the internet and you're compensating the creators for every copy you've downloaded or that anyone has downloaded from you or that anyone has downloaded from them, then you are beyond, beyond repproach...

...and very, very broke.